Yesterday, I took my son to get an x-ray, and seated in the small, cramped office were two young girls with masks on who'd tested positive for tuburculosis. They were clearly contagious. They were foreigners, and a wave of anger overcame me.
Don't be so sure. A few years ago I had a college student from Japan renting a room in my house. Just before graduation, the college made everybody get a routine TB test, and if the skin test showed any reaction at all, an X-ray followed. Well, this girl had a very slight skin reaction, and the X-ray showed a spot on her lung. She explained that the spot had been seen on X-rays when she was very young, and had been checked out and determined to be benign -- and after all those years it was still just the one little spot. Nevertheless, they confined her to the campus infirmary and made her wear a mask all the time. Further testing proved conclusively that she didn't have tuberculosis. Extreme precautions are taken when there's the slightest evidence of possible TB infection. Most likely those kids in your doctor's office didn't have TB and/or weren't contagious. If anybody really thought they were contagious, they wouldn't have been there.